Describe a project that failed. What did you learn from it?
Why This Is Asked
Interviewers want to see that you can reflect honestly on failure and extract lessons. They're assessing your accountability (do you own your part?), your ability to learn, and whether you've applied those lessons—not whether you've never failed (that would be a red flag).
Key Points to Cover
- A clear description of the failure and your role in it
- Honest reflection on what went wrong (including your own contributions)
- Specific lessons learned and how you've applied them since
- How you communicated the failure to stakeholders and what you did next
STAR Method Answer Template
Describe the context - what was happening, what team/company, what was at stake
What was your specific responsibility or challenge?
What specific steps did you take? Be detailed about YOUR actions
What was the outcome? Use metrics where possible. What did you learn?
💡 Tips
- Choose a real failure—avoid stories where "we learned something" but everything turned out fine
- Take ownership of your part; don't blame others exclusively
- Show that the failure led to concrete changes in how you or your team operate
✍️ Example Response
STAR formatSituation: I led a migration project at a fintech: moving our core payment processing from a monolithic system to a microservices architecture. We had 18 months and a team of 8. The business case was strong—faster feature delivery, better reliability. We missed the deadline by 6 months and had to run both systems in parallel longer than planned, costing $2M in extra infra and delaying new product work.
Task: I was the engineering lead. The failure was mine to own.
Action: I ran a blameless post-mortem. The root causes: we underestimated the complexity of stateful payment flows, we didn't have enough integration test coverage, and we kept adding scope ("while we're at it, let's also..."). I presented the findings to leadership without deflecting. I owned my part: I should have pushed for a phased approach and said no to scope creep. I implemented changes: we adopted a "strangler fig" migration pattern for future work, we added integration test gates, and we created a scope change process—any new scope required a formal impact assessment. I also shared the lessons in an engineering all-hands so other teams could learn.
Result: The migration eventually completed. The next major initiative used our new process and delivered on time. I learned that failure is a teacher—but only if you own it, analyze it, and change how you work. Deflecting prevents learning.
🏢 Companies Known to Ask This
| Company | Variation / Focus |
|---|---|
| Amazon | Learn & Be Curious, Ownership — "Tell me about a project that failed" |
| Navigating ambiguity, learning from failure | |
| Meta | Moving fast, impact, learning |
| Microsoft | Growth mindset, execution |
| Netflix | High performance, candor about failure |
| Stripe | Moving fast in ambiguity |